Louisiana Democratic Party

The Louisiana Democratic Party is the Louisiana state affiliate of the Democratic Party, founded in 1828. It developed during the middle-1830s as it won the support of anti-tariff cotton planters and Louisiana Creoles, while the Democrats went on to help the thousands of Irish and German immigrants who arrived in New Orleans in the 1840s to integrate into American society; meanwhile, many Anglo-American settlers voted for the Whigs. The collapse of the Whigs in the 1850s led to pro-slavery Whigs joining the Democrats, which dominated politics in antebellum Louisiana (from Alexandre Mouton's election in 1843 through the American Civil War); the nativist Know Nothings briefly dominated New Orleans. The Reconstruction of the late 1860s and 1870s saw the Republican Party briefly dominate state politics as the newly-enfranchised African-American majority was now able to vote. The Democratic Party resisted Republican domination with the help of white paramilitary groups, briefly taking over the New Orleans government in an armed uprising in 1872 (carrying out the Colfax Massacre against blacks), while the White League established chapters in numerous parishes and disrupted Republican meetings and voting. After Reconstruction's end in 1877 and the withdrawal of federal troops from Louisiana, the Democratic Party quickly regained control of the state legislature and politics through the intimidation of black voters, and blacks were excluded from Louisiana politics until the 1960s, while the Democrats held the governorship until 1980. During the 1880s, the Democratic state legislature passed Jim Crow laws and institutionalized racial segregation, and they also disenfranchised both poor blacks and poor whites in 1898 in order to prevent the Populist Party and Republican Party from returning to power in the state legislature. That same year, however, the Democrats allowed for disenfranchised voters to vote if their ancestors had voted in 1867 or before the Civil War; this "grandfather clause" allowed poor whites to vote, while blacks were unable to vote, as they had been enslaved before the Civil War. During the New Deal, the power of the Southern Democrats in the Solid South prevented federal funding from reaching the African-American communities of the American South. However, the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and the northern Democrats' support for integration led to many white conservative voters in the South voting for Republican presidential candidates, presaging their realignment towards the Republican Party. As African-Americans returned to politics, they overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party. The realignment of conservative whites towards the Republican Party took longer in Louisiana than it did in other states, as Democrats monopolized the governorship until 1980, and, as of 2019, there were four Democratic and four Republican governors of Louisiana since 1980. The Great Migration of blacks from the South to the North led to Louisiana becoming a predominantly-white state, and, in 2011, the Republicans came to dominate all of the statewide offices in Louisiana.